George S. Fraser House
This landmark of Dupont Circle has functioned as a private home, tea room, restaurant, and nightclub.
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Completed in 1890, the George S. Fraser House was designed by Hornblower and Marshall, a prominent Washington architecture firm. The Fraser home is architecturally indicative of the firm’s stylistic originality in the 1880s and 1890s. Defined as an architecturally transitional building, the large structure combines elements of the Richardsonian Romanesque, Italian Renaissance, and English-American Colonial styles. Distinctive elements include the use of pink granite, a tiled and hipped roof, Palladian windows, and a pillared portico.
The home was originally built for George S. Fraser, a New York merchant who arrived in the District in 1888. His widow sold the home in 1901 to Miriam Douglas Thropp, daughter of Abraham Lincoln’s Assistant Secretary of War and president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Alexander Scott. After Miriam’s death in 1930, the home was sold and subsequently opened to the public as the Parrot Tea Room (with a boarding house upstairs) in 1932.
In 1950, the space was leased to John Goldstein who altered the space for restaurant service, operating The Golden Parrot Restaurant Inc. until 1974. It then housed the Sagittarius Nightclub.
Today, the former home, that went through a series of uses, is the National Affairs Office of the Church of Scientology.
DC Inventory: June 27, 1974
National Register: August 19, 1975
Located within the Dupont Circle Historic District
